


incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lighting

by Wolvesandwerewolves



Series: I’m With You in Rockland [15]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen, Schizophrenia, Schizophrenia/Schizoaffective Disorder, mental health, mentions of bullying
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:26:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26263378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wolvesandwerewolves/pseuds/Wolvesandwerewolves
Summary: It’s the first thunderstorm of the year. Klaus and Ben take the bus home.
Relationships: Ben Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves
Series: I’m With You in Rockland [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1865728
Comments: 17
Kudos: 105





	incomparable blind streets of shuddering cloud and lighting

**Author's Note:**

> sorry this took so long :/ I was caught up daydreaming about a scene entirely unrelated to this and like...it doesn’t even make sense...there’s no context for it. its a work i might not even post. but it would not leave me alone and every time i tried to sit down and write this, it haunted me instead. so i finally wrote that tonight, and got it off my chest, and then i wrote this! Yay! 
> 
> Also...i read somewhere as I was doing research for this series that while people with schizophrenia/the like are more likely to commit violent crimes on tv/in fiction, in REAL LIFE they’re actually more likely to be victims of crimes instead. so...we might cover that a little bit in this chapter too...

It’s March, now. 

The weather should be warming up, and he thinks it is, for the most part. The temperatures don’t drop so low at night on the gauge outside, and the snow fall is beginning to drop. The skies begin to clear, cold grey fading back to striking blue. And next week, according to Chanel 10, it’s supposed to get up to 60 degrees. 

But right now, it feels like they’ve been pushed both backwards and forwards in time. They’re in a small pocket of the universe, feeling upside down, somewhere the skies rumble and the streets freeze. Soft hail rains down, piles up against the dips of the curves in the street. It’s thundering and snowing, an odd mixture of summer and winter weather. 

Thunder sounds above them, quiet, rolling in waves and almost echoing. Lightning flashes, and it briefly illuminates the silver streaks pouring down, bouncing off the slick pavement. 

“Maybe we should take the bus home tonight,” Ben says. 

Weather doesn’t affect him at all, anymore. He’s dead, and so he can’t feel it. But Klaus, surprisingly, doesn’t look like he’s freezing from where he stands next to him, holding a bright pink and clear umbrella with one hand, an unlit cigarette with the other. His hair dances in the wind, and the front of his stolen leather coat _(borrowed_ , he’d said, as he grabbed it from the back of their brother’s car) flaps against his chest. His long skirt ripples away, revealing tights and thick wool socks hidden under boots. 

At least he’s wearing shoes, tonight.

Klaus shrugs, placing the cigarette in his mouth and turning his head to face Ben. His cheeks are red, eyes squinted in the dim light of the street. It’s three am.

“It’s not even cold out,” he says. Thunder booms. 

“You’re ridiculous,” Ben says. He shuffles closer, puts his hood up and crosses his arms. Somehow it still feels odd, standing in the open of the storm when it all passes through him like smoke. “It’s _hailing.”_

Klaus raises his eyebrows, like he hasn’t noticed at all. He fishes the lighter out of his pocket, raises the umbrella higher to use that hand to shield from the wind as he flicks the flame. Orange blazes bright, just the breath of a spark, and the flame dies twice before it’s even there. Klaus tries again. It doesn’t light. 

“Bus,” Ben says, pointedly.

He sighs, flicks the cigarette from his mouth and stuffs it back inside his coat. He sticks his tongue out at him. 

Ben rolls his eyes, tries not show Klaus he’s smiling. 

“Alright, alright. Night bus it is.” He sighs again, and Ben mirrors him this time. 

It’s only a half a block to the nearest stop. Klaus kicks at the snow piles as he walks, even throws a snowball at Ben and laughs when it passes through his face. He twirls the umbrella in between the tips of his fingers, one hand hovering out and Ben watches the rush of ice crystals flying off the surface, glittering in the pale blue light. He can’t feel it, but his brother grins, wriggles his fingers and says something of sharp needles pricking the skin.

When they get there, he and Klaus stand just under the tiny, metal-lined glass roof, watching as raindrops, dark grey beneath purple lightning, tremble and coalesce down the sides. After a few minutes, betting on different races of raindrops like little kids, the bus rolls to a stop in front of them, illuminated ugly and yellow like the halls of their apartment.

It’s mostly empty. It always is, the rare nights when the weather is bad enough to convince Klaus to not walk. Or the even rarer nights when he’s quiet and distant, and takes the bus simply because walking, as he tells Ben sometimes, is just too much effort. 

There’s two men towards the back, bundled up in thick coats and long jeans. A woman, curled up on one seat, sharp angles underneath a thin wool blanket. Aside from them, and the driver, that’s it. 

Klaus sits heavily onto one seat, leans his head against the window even though it must be cold and uncomfortable. He grins at Ben like he just made a joke, but he didn’t. Tonight is a good night.

Ben tries not to encourage him too much, doesn’t smile back even as his eyebrows raise with humor reflected back. He sits down next to him on the seat, doesn’t feel the cold hard plastic of it. He lets his shoulder pass through his brother’s. 

“Tell me a story, Ben,” he hums, and he sounds like he’s mocking him. 

Ben groans. He wishes he had died holding anything other than Frankenstein, now. His love of it is nostalgic, but the words are scratched into his mind, burned and bruised into neuron synapses. The pages are too familiar in his fingers, he can feel them rough against his skin even when he doesn’t take it out of his pocket. The weight is heavy, bulky in his sweatshirt, but infinitely better there than in his hands, again. 

He knows that by now, Klaus asks him mostly to tease him. He thinks it’s funny, their boring annoyance with each and every word memorized. It’s humor dips and rises to him, but Klaus will always laugh at it. 

“You’re a masochist,” Ben says. 

Klaus laughs, quietly to himself as he shakes his head. 

His laughter is promptly echoed, loud, obnoxious, and cruelly sarcastic. Ben looks over towards the men at the back of the bus. They look loose-limbed, sloppy smiles painted sharp against the lines of their faces, eyes hooded and bright. One stares directly at him—at _Klaus_ , because Ben is invisible to them. The other is hunched halfway over, face brushing against the fabric of his friend’s coat as he laughs. 

Ben wonders if they smell of alcohol. He tries to think if he’d seen them, at the club before they ushered people out, cleaned up and closed down. The place is always crowded. They don’t look familiar.

“Oh, really?” Klaus says, sharply drawing his attention back to their conversation. He nods, listening, but doesn’t take his eyes off the men as they eye his brother with drunken interest, making rude gestures towards each other. “I thought I was—”

Ben shushes him. 

The men are pretending to talk to the empty space next to them, now, nodding towards the unused seat across the isle and disagreeing with absolutely nothing, words interrupted with broken laughter and empty silence.

He thinks, briefly, that maybe they’re not mocking his brother. Maybe they actually see someone there, like the bugs that Klaus saw months ago, that never were there. It’s a harsh blossom of ruthless hope in his chest, the memories of the other patients that Klaus talked and bonded with. But he knows, they’re not them, even as he wants them to be. 

They’re insulting, instead. 

Klaus rolls his eyes, easily impassive and unconcerned in the least. He waves his hand dismissively, the dark tattooed _Goodbye_ still broken up with pink scar tissue, from that night he punched a window, held the glass until it stained red. Ben grinds his teeth at the memory, the unwelcome feelings of guilt burning in his stomach like acid.

“Old news, Ben,” he says, which hurts in a way he maybe should expect but doesn’t. 

He thinks of when they were kids. He knows he used to mock Klaus like this, too. They all did. Except for Vanya, who never once made fun of him, from what he can remember.

It was funny, then. Somehow it was never horrifying to them when Klaus would have entire conversations with nobody, or when he would wake them screaming in the night. It was annoying, most of the time. And often, it was even entertaining. 

He wonders how many of the figures he saw as a child were real, like him, and what they said or did to him. 

_(He wonders if the trauma of seeing dead people, broken like they were in that worn down motel, decaying and bruised and covered in brown-old blood—if that’s what was the spark that led to his schizophrenia. Maybe it was being forced to believe no one was ever actually there. Maybe it was him, and his siblings, and their father. Maybe it was none of it.)_

But it doesn’t matter, he has to remind himself, as he continues to watch the men as they shriek, obnoxious and disgusting. Klaus is schizophrenic. He just is. And he deserves better than—well, _this_.

He hates that they’re making fun of him for something like this, something they don’t even understand. 

Ben wants to kill them. 

He hates himself for it, pushes it down, forces the memories of foreign tentacles and rain showers of blood, hot, metallic, awful, out of his mind. His fingers twitch, but he hasn’t had a panic attack since he died, no physical feelings left to trap him inside of. Just bad memories.

Just because he was raised on death—just like Klaus was, in a different, gruesome way—it doesn’t mean he’s violent. He’s not his father. 

He would rather protect his brother than hurt them. _(Even if one is easier. Would be easier, were he alive.)_

Ben stands up. He doesn’t realize until then that Klaus is still talking to him. It’s unimportant, he thinks—he’s whining about the book he’d bought Ben just a few days ago, complaining that he should have brought it because _buses are so boring, aren’t they? Ben, are you listening?_

“Yeah,” Ben agrees, voice harsher than he means it to be. He clears his throat. “Come on, Klaus.”

“Oh, but I thought it was hailing?” Klaus teases. But he gets up, casually swings the tip of the umbrella through Ben’s stomach and laughs. He’s as carefree as Ben isn’t. He doesn’t want to think why this doesn’t affect him. “Oh, and we’re still an entire block from home, too.”

“I’m sorry,” Ben says, too sincere for Klaus’s cheerful voice. He doesn’t know what he’s apologizing for—the men on the bus, or the memories of himself like them, before they were close. Maybe all of it. “Sorry.”

Klaus looks at him strangely. The shade of his face changes as he steps off the bus, purple and bright when inside it was harsh and yellowed. Snow builds up on the fabric of his bright teal sweatshirt, leather coat still unzipped. His breath smokes out in the air, mingling with tiny ice crystals illuminated by lightning. Thunder rumbles again, louder now they’re outside. The sound sets him more at ease, somehow. 

“At least it isn’t cold out,” Klaus says, kicking a pile of snow and watching as it bursts into glittering white dust. 

Ben laughs. _You’re insane,_ he thinks, except it’s actually true. It isn’t a bad thing, like he used to think. Klaus is just Klaus. He doesn’t say it out loud, like maybe he would have one year ago.

Instead, he says, “You’re so weird.”

Klaus throws his head back and laughs. 

The sound is echoed behind them.

**Author's Note:**

> i just can’t be nice to my favorite characters, idk how to be. it’s ok, ben is very protective and he isn’t the only one! we all love klaus here. <3
> 
> Alsooooo just a hint on where my mind is for next chapter...it’s the first thunder storm since vanya has stopped taking her pills. she’s probably gonna be so overwhelmed. It’s ok, we love her too!! 
> 
> i live in the Midwest btw in america and i was once in a storm exactly like this. it was the coolest thing ever. it was hailing and snowing and thundering and lightning and when I went outside, in the middle of feb, i wore shorts bc it was like surprisingly warm. like maybe 35-40 degrees i think? not awful for snow! it was so cool
> 
> Edit again bc I never shut up: can i just say that I meant for this series to be maybe four works long? and then i had one chapter, like maybe chapter 5 set my out to be canon timeline/season 1. and then that was it. lol, look how far we’ve come. pat ur selves on the back, I could not have done this without your encouragement and also i mean it when i say i love u 
> 
> Anyways xoxo i love you the title is from Howl xoxo


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